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AMD's UVD2-based XvBA Finally Does Something On Linux

11-03-2009, 10:50 AM

Phoronix: AMD's UVD2-based XvBA Finally Does Something On Linux

For a year now we have been talking about XvBA, which stands for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration and is designed to implement AMD's Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) engine on Linux systems for improving the video decoding and playback process on desktop systems. AMD has been shipping an XvBA library with their ATI Catalyst Linux driver since last year, but they have yet to release any documentation on the XvBA API or any patches to implement the support within any Linux media players. Heck, AMD has not even officially confirmed XvBA with Phoronix being the lone source of information for the past year. Today though, XvBA has finally become useful under Linux. But it is not what you may be thinking...

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True, its nice that they follow the va-api standard, but all in all ATI sucks again, not only because they completly forget UVD and r600 UVD but they also very limited in supported Codecs.

This will be my last ATI Card i see the progress but im not willing to wait any longer until fglrx gets as good as the nvidia blob or until the free driver matures(which will never have UVD support annyway )

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Random curiosity.. Do the 780G/785G have UVD2 onboard, or is that UVD1, or some weird hybrid of the two?

I'm glad that there's support coming out for the 4000+ radeons, but my main interest at the moment is video acceleration on my mythbox, which has a 780G (HD3200) in it. If the 780G ends up being supported by this new software I might just switch back to fglrx. I know mythtv doesn't support VA-API yet, but at least I'll be able to use it for external videos I've got loaded onto my mythbox (using MPlayer).

And hopefully now that VA-API can be used by ATI/Intel/Nvidia cards it'll get more support. I wouldn't be surprised if some developers were holding off on choosing an API until they saw what ATI was going to do.